Sorry I don’t understand. Please can you explain what your inverters have to do with grid import?
They might measure it as part of your solar or storage system but there’s only one wire with power coming in (3 phase excepted). Why wouldn’t you just use one sensor/meter?
Thanks, got you.
Will use the CT sensor to evaluate the peak & off peak. Was confusing my self with the 2 sets of data I get from the dual inverters. Your ofcourse correct, the CT measures everything out & in
This thread is a bit old, but in case it helps I can add a bit more detail as I went through this yesterday. I will also show the traps I fell in
The 3 helpers created are these
The top one has a drop down to flip between peak and off peak
It is then necessary to set up an automation to flip between the two (or more) rate settings. I have a switch for peak / off peak already so I just used that as the trigger. It didn’t work at first and I found these two issues, because I copied someone else’s script
Peak is not the same as peak, check your case is correct.
I made errors on the entity name, based on my screenshot above I needed select.electricity_meter
Is there a timing issue around when the helper sensors become valid as grid consumption sensors?
I’ve set everything up a couple of days ago, the helpers are counting peak and off peak usage in kWh, but the energy dashboard is not letting me add them to the Grid Consumption area.
Does that mean the utility meters don’t appear in the drop down in settings - dashboards- energy - add consumption? I’ve only had problems if the sensors weren’t actually counting.
Have you tried a restart (sorry know it’s a cliche)? Do you see any sensors offered in the drop down?
Congrats on getting it going - all that YAML must have taken some persistence.
I really don’t know why the tariff variable approach didn’t work. Hate not knowing so I’ve created a test utility meter with three rates and this automation to control the selector
alias: Peak/Cheap rate select for three rate Utility meter
description: ""
trigger:
- platform: time
at: "02:00:00"
variables:
tariff: Cheap
- platform: time
at: "05:00:00"
variables:
tariff: Standard
- platform: time
at: "16:00:00"
variables:
tariff: Peak
- platform: time
at: "19:00:00"
variables:
tariff: Standard
action:
- service: select.select_option
target:
entity_id: select.test_utility_meter
data:
option: "{{ tariff }}"
mode: single
Will leave it running for 24 hours and see how it goes
To be honest, I very seldom look at the energy dashboard. I have a card on my own energy dashboard that shows cumulative data, so created all the helpers to populate that.
Flex is a three rate four period tariff so had to add two new time triggers to the original Go automation and make sure the variables were set to the correct rates defined in the utility meter. The set.select_option is case sensitive so the rates in the automation YAML have to match the rates that were defined in the utility meter setup exactly.
Last point. You don’t have to use just one (complicated/YAML) automation to set the rate selector.
Everything can be done in the UI - set up one automation per rate:
Trigger on the start time for the rate.
Set the action to ‘Call Service’ and choose ‘select: select_option’
Choose the correct utility meter helper
Type the rate you want selected into the option box - case sensitive
Save and name
Repeat for the different rate periods. This approach is simple but not quite so easy to maintain as the times are in three different automations.
For Octopus Flex can set two time triggers in the automation selecting the standard rate so only need three automations.
If you need to set import and export helpers and the time periods for both are the same then can select both of the helpers to be updated in the same automation - just add a second entity - (+Choose entity) in the Targets section of the UI.
I have set up my meter helpers as shown above and created the automation to change from peak to offpeak to peak etc. The meter switches correctly. However the data useage is recording in both peak and offpeak.